New Funding Awards

November 17, 2010

NEW GRANT AWARDS:

Kirk
Barrett, Passaic
River Institute, CSAM, received $30,943 for the first year of a four year grant
from the National Science Foundation for “MSU’s Research Experience for
Undergraduates”. This grant will provide 10 students with an eight week
summer educational experience through participation in transdisciplinary,
hands-on field research in environmental sciences. Much of the research
will take place at MSU’s field campus at the New Jersey School of Conservation.
Seven faculty members will serve as mentors on the project: Dibyendu
Sarkar, Paul Bologna, Joshua Galster, Duke Ophori, Gregory Pope, Huan Feng and
MeiYin Wu.

Evan Fuller, Mathematical Sciences, CSAM, received $15,700 for the first
year of a three year National Science Foundation grant held by Rutgers.
The project, entitled “Proving Styles in University Mathematics,” will
investigate the prevalence and correlation with success of different proving
strategies used by undergraduate math majors. One hundred math majors
will be interviewed as they complete tasks. Their proving strategies will
be examined to determine how their use of different strategies correlates with
success on interview tasks and how their preferred strategy correlates with
intelligence or academic success as measured by SAT scores and grades.
David Galef,English,
CHSS, has been awarded a year-end fellowship stay at the Virginia Center for
Creative Arts.Lisa Lieberman, Health and Nutrition Science, CEHS, received $132,940 in
funding from Inwood House in New York, for the first year of a five year
sub-award to MSU of $670,344. Funded by the US Department of Health
and Human Services, the Adolescent Family Life Program will evaluate the
efficacy of Inwood House’s continuum of care for pregnant teens when enhanced
by specific additional services offered to pregnant teens and their significant
others. A graduate student assistant will assist with development of
surveys, protocols and approval documents.

Bryan Murdock, Director for Service Learning in the Research Academy of
University Learning, and Bill Thomas, Director of the School of
Conservation, received a one year grant for $260,000 from the New Jersey
Commission on National and Community Service for an AmeriCorps
project. This is a collaboration among MSU’s New Jersey School of
Conservation, the Service Learning and Community Engagement Program and the
Center for Student Involvement. It will build and develop a multi-site,
campus-based national service program to engage University resources in three
areas: environmental action and education, community economic development, and
education.
Jing Peng, Computer Science, CSAM, received a grant from Syracuse
University funded by the US Department of Air Force in the amount of $29,040
for a research project titled “Closed-Loop Learning Integrated Robust
Information Fusion”. The goal of this project is to prove a strong result
for the proposed algorithm by casting it within the adversarial multi-armed
bandit framework and further validating the analysis using wide area image data
for persistent target tracking.

Jennifer
Brown Urban, Family
and Child Studies, CEHS, received supplemental funding of $60,478 to support an
undergraduate student for three years from Cornell University’s National
Science Foundation grant. This ongoing grant, entitled “Systems
Evaluation Protocol of Assessing and Improving STEM,” explores how effective
evaluation systems are developed both generally and for STEM education programs
specifically.

Mei Yin Wu, Biology and Molecular Biology, CSAM, received $14,138
for the first year of a three year grant from the National Science Foundation
for a project entitled “Collaborative Research: Greenhouse Gas Balance of
Urban Temperate Wetlands”. Because it is critical to assess the danger
global climate change poses to wetlands, this project, a
collaborative effort with Rutgers University, will derive greenhouse gas
balances for two distinct urban temperate wetland ecosystems. Two undergraduate
students will be trained in climate change science in anticipation of them
choosing a science career path.